Every project leaves behind a residue of what could not be done. Drafts, failed proposals, truncated fieldworks, texts that collapsed under their own weight. The Museum of Abandonments begins here—in what has been left unfinished, rejected, or undone. It is an archive not of achievement but of hesitation, fragility, and methodological detour.
To abandon something is not simply to discard it; it is to expose the limits of one’s capacity to hold, to sustain, to finish. This museum is therefore not a monument to failure, but a space of care for what exceeds or escapes our intentions. Each entry reclaims the status of the incomplete as an ethnographic condition: the point where methods falter, concepts dissolve, and the work itself begins to think back.
Following Haraway’s (2016) invitation to stay with the trouble and Strathern’s (1991) call to live with partial connections, this space resists the fantasy of ethnographic completion. Like Tsing’s (2015) salvage ecologies and Halberstam’s (2011) queer failures, it finds vitality in what lingers after success has been defined elsewhere. To curate abandonment is to practice a form of care: one that attends to residues, drafts, and ruins not as waste, but as living matter still capable of thought.
Ontologically, this is a collection of ghosts—proposals that never found funding, essays that refused to close, field sites that slipped away. Rather than erasing them, this museum holds their afterlife open. In dialogue with Stoler’s (2008) notion of imperial debris and Stewart’s (2007) attention to ordinary affects, the museum transforms the ruin into an analytic and affective condition. What happens when we exhibit hesitation as method, exhaustion as data, and failure as form?
Pedagogically, the Museum of Abandonments offers a counter-archive. It invites students and colleagues to see that knowledge is not a straight line from fieldwork to publication, but an assemblage of false starts, lingering affects, and abandoned drafts. In this sense, it joins what Mol (2008) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017)describe as logics of care—an ethics that values ongoing adjustment and maintenance over closure. To study anthropology is to inhabit incompletion, to stay with the partial and the faltering, to learn from what does not hold.
This is, above all, a vulnerable practice. A refusal to perform coherence. To open the drawer where the discarded lives, to name what was left behind, is to confront the conditions of making knowledge: precarious, partial, affectively charged. Yet it is precisely in that exposure—in showing what others hide—that another anthropology becomes possible: one that collects not certainties, but the delicate infrastructures of their undoing.
References
- Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge.
- Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219.
- Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.